Science Practice #5

This NSF funded research document describes the goals for productive academic discourse and important tools to enable educators to engage students in science talk. This work is required reading in multiple science workshops including NGSX.

This tool can be used to set goals for academic productive talk in the classroom and monitor that talk.

This site includes resources and videos on how to write evidence-based arguments as well as a culture of argumentation in the classroom.

Table tents with sentence starters provide a scaffold for getting kids to talk about evidence. This resource provides two different table tents:  1) for getting kids to share their thinking and build on each other's ideas and 2) for helping students to clarify other students' thinking. These are "must have" resources when building a classroom culture where students think together and all ideas are valued.

This site, created by educator Katherine Cadwell, includes a variety of tools for  “tracking” a Harkness discussion, allowing teachers to gather data as the discussion takes place for the sake of improving discussions.

This practical research brief for teachers includes tools that can be used to scaffold student science talk. They can then reflect on what they have learned from students to inform next steps in their instruction. This brief supports the purpose for talk and provides resourses for classroom teacher to use.

This resource from Ambitious Science Teaching helps develop strategies for incorporating more talk into science learning.

This Google folder includes resources developed by OpenSciEd to guide teachers when building classroom culture and norms.